ASHS 2025 Conference

Advance registration and ticket purchase required.

Speaker: Dr. Gary Bachman

Gary R. Bachman is well known as the host of Mississippi State University Extension Service's award-winning Southern Gardening television, newspaper, radio, and social media franchise. Through his personal, conversational style, Dr. Bachman has made a tremendous impact on consumers of horticultural products and services in Mississippi and across the Southeast/

Everyone working at the university level is expected to evaluate the impact of their programs. The knowledge and practice of evaluation is assumed to be among the skill sets of staff, including early career staff, without the provision of professional development or analysis support. This is not the case. In 2024, Rutgers conducted statewide and national surveys of Master Gardener programs. Of staff and faculty responding to Rutgers national survey, 73% said that they either did not have the time or the knowledge of evaluation processes to successfully evaluate their programs.

This workshop will explore the process and outcome of this research followed by a hands-on activity illustrating the pitfalls of survey creation and how to avoid them. This opportunity to learn about survey data collection and analysis while using data that is current and relative to the Master Gardener program is invaluable. The participants of this workshop will experience designing research surveys, evaluating data and using sound research processes while exploring data collected via the Rutgers study from over 2,000 participants ranging from volunteers to national stakeholders. Unexpected vs. invalid outcomes will be included. The data presented as examples is as important as the learning process. For example, 97% of staff respondents, regardless of organization, did not see the Master Gardener volunteers as “masters of horticulture”. Participants will attempt to determine if this is an indication of survey bias or process issues or is the data valid, revealing training deficiencies, performance issues, or bias toward volunteers as non-professionals. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how to evaluate their Master Gardener programs and with foundation data on which to build future analysis.

Moderator: Ruth Carll, State Leader, Consumer Horitculture, Rutgers

Speakers:

• Ruth Carll, State Leader, Consumer Horticulture, Rutgers
• Belinda Chester, Senior Program Coordinator, Rutgers

Overview Goal:
The goal of this workshop is to bring together professionals who manage Master Gardener programs and, through guided discussion, identify methods for implementing surveys that deliver valid data by examining a current survey project’s development process and outcomes.

Format:

1. Pre-test
2. Group introduction and orientation to the topic
3. Small group activities with real-time reporting
4. Post-discussion assessment
5. Partnership creation
6. Wrap-up and distribution of notes

This important session is part of the USDA-SCRI-CAPS project, "Climate Resilient High-Quality Tomato Varieties for Sustainable Production," and will serve as a key component of our collaborative efforts. While many of the attendees are part of ASHS, we anticipate that several non-ASHS members will also join us, making this a valuable opportunity for broader engagement.

Ethylene-releasing and ethylene-inhibiting materials are essential tools to manage different aspects of horticultural crop production such as plant growth and development, flowering, stress response, thinning and harvesting. This workshop will focus on two topics related to promoting ethylene and two topics related to inhibiting ethylene in horticultural crop production highlighting aspects of 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxilic acid (ACC), Ethephon, aminoethoxyvinylglycine (AVG) and 1-Methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) applications in horticulture. Following each of these two broad categories of ethylene related materials, time will be provided for discussion and questions with the speakers and participants. The overall goal of this interactive workshop is to bring together speakers working on methods to influence ethylene related processes in different horticultural commodities to provide an environment for the exchange of information on new uses and management tools of ethylene-releasing and ethylene-inhibiting plant growth regulators.

Speakers:

• Dr. Esmaeil Fallahi – ACC Use on Tree Fruits University of Idaho
• Dr. Garrett Owen – Use of the Ethylene Generating PGR Collate in the Ornamental Industry Ohio State University
• Dr. Shinsuke Agehara – 1-MCP as it Relates to Suppressing Ethylene-Induced Stress Responses in Vegetable Transplants University of Florida Dr.
•  Dr. Jimmy Larson – AVG/Tools to Manage Apple Harvest Utah State University

The student must stand in front of the physical poster during the competition hours and the judges will walk around to each contestant. The student will be given 5 minutes to make a presentation to the judges, followed by a 2 minute period of questions and answers. There is no virtual presentation option.
Please note: Signing up for the competition means that you are agreeing to present twice – once for your regularly scheduled poster session and once in the competition.  If you do not also present your poster during the regularly scheduled Conference Poster session program, you will be disqualified from the Poster Competition, and your abstract will not be published in the on-line supplement of HortScience.
Competition winners in each graduate level program (MS and PhD) will each receive monetary prizes ($300 first; $200 second; $100 third) and the winners' names and abstracts will be posted to the ASHS web site and highlighted in the ASHS E-News.
The winners are announced at the Awards and Trivia Night on Thursday, July 31 at 6:00 pm during the conference.